


Never Cry Wolf

by potted_music



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: M/M, War correspondent AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-25 08:19:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3803362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fill of this prompt @ dressing-room3: "I would sell my soul, as well as that of the hypothetical first-born child, for a fic where Harry's a war correspondent of some renown, Merlin is his long-suffering editor, and together, they stumble into something that they were not supposed to know. Evidence of war crimes? Ghosts, mummies and other creepy-crawlies of the more fantastic sort? Anything goes!"</p><p>What it says on the tin, basically. Also features Eggsy as a young war photographer, because why not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 1) I'm filling my own prompts, because dignity is the one thing that you simply cannot afford if you are into weird AUs. I've been carrying war correspondent AU plotbunnies like an albatross around my neck, and finally decided, well, why not. So, this is largely plotless and pointless geekery.
> 
> 2) Please note that "Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings" line at the top. There won't be any graphic violence (nor any mentions of anything contemporary), but, you know, setting-specific yuck is setting-specific and yucky. 
> 
> 3) As a non-native speaker of English, I have about 0 chances of getting Eggsy's Cockney right, so I'm not even trying.
> 
> 4) Also, still not a native speaker, still unbetaed, here be monsters. (Although, if some kind soul would volunteer to weed out the monstrosities, I would love you long time.)
> 
> Now that I've guaranteed that nobody reads past this point, on to the fic XD

_And that is how our motley party, comprised of a dead photographer, a stray reporter for Christian Science Monitor, who was not all that his title made him out to be, and yours truly, ended up at a bombed-out bus stop, about two years late for the last bus._

Harry Hart, _Never Cry Wolf_

 

Harry’s marriage survived the Taliban, but not a minor border skirmish that nobody would have even covered, if not for a lull at the usual hotspots. Maybe it was just the cumulative effect, years of Harry rushing off to yet another war zone and bringing his dead to their nice little house, the mutilated and the hastily buried trailing through his thoughts and dreams. Jeanine sends divorce papers to Merlin's address, Harry having no permanent place of residence when on assignment, and he pores through them while the coffee's brewing, perched in a beam of sunlight on a bar stool in his kitchen, all white planes and metal. As he gets to the last page, the bedroom door swings open and a leftover from yesterday’s party saunters out, naked and glorious. Eggsy something- Merlin smiles with relief at actually remembering the name. Eggsy Unwin, impressive work on the War on Drugs, even more impressive flexibility and a conspicuous lack of inhibitions. Eggsy smiles, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and leans over his shoulder to take a look at the papers. While Merlin admires the bite mark he left on the young man’s shoulder last night, Eggsy gives an impressed whistle.

"Wow, the guy sends you pictures of dead bodies by the roadside and what he ate for breakfast, and you are excited enough about that to show them to strangers you are trying to pull at parties. For, like, a good twenty minutes. And his wife sends you his divorce papers. You really are married to him, you know that, right?”

"Yes," Merlin nods, because it is too early in the morning to argue the obvious, and pours them both coffee. As he starts piling baked beans on crumbling toast, Eggsy decisively puts his palms on Merlin’s hips, and turns him around to face him.

They had a go at it earlier, lazy in the early-morning sunlight, floating through the boundary waters between sleep and awaking, all roaming hands and a distant dreamy sense of wonder. Merlin crushes his lips to Eggsy’s.

Merlin has a good four inches on him, and he uses it to make Eggsy throw his head far back, yielding to the press of his lips and tongue, and Merlin’s palms on Eggsy’s shoulderblades are the only thing that prevents him from toppling over. Merlin revels in the weight of that golden body, in the lingering smell of sweat from sleep and sex, in being in control. He pushes his leg in between Eggsy’s thighs, and the boy twists and writhes to push back into the touch, with joy and abandon. Letting go of his shoulders, Eggsy stands up a bit firmer, grabs Merlin by the arm and directs his hand behind his back, towards his arse. 

“Needy, aren’t you?” Merlin chuckles, reminded of last night, Eggsy bent at the waist, pushing back into his thrusts. He makes a move to disentangle them and get the lube from the bedroom, but Eggsy only pulls him closer.

“I can take it like this, please.”

Eggsy bends at the waist and props one foot up on the chair, giving him better access, rolls his hips around Merlin’s fingers, completely unselfconscious, happy in his effortlessly shapely body of a twenty five year old.

Merlin moans at the sight of the head of his cock nudging Eggsy open, it is too tight and too much, and he does not dare push much deeper. Eggsy stills under him, Merlin keeps running his palms over his heaving ribs, catching his nipples with his thumbs on the slide up. Eggsy, eyes glazed and not fully there, tries to turn, tries to kiss him, sloppy and uncoordinated, Merlin leans forward and starts punching into him in short shallow thrusts, the head of his cock almost sliding out of that pliant body. Eggsy scrabbles at the edge of the tabletop and curses, breathless and awed. All in all, Merlin decides, his life is quite incredible.

When they finally get back to their unintentionally cold breakfast, Eggsy, perched on the stool with his legs spread not altogether unselfconsciously, nods at the papers. As he takes a huge bite of his toast and smears beans all over his face, Merlin leans forward to wipe his chin. Smiling into his touch, Eggsy asks, "What was he like, when he was my age?"

Merlin does not rise to the bait. "An insufferable prick. I hated his guts."

"What changed?"

He shrugs. “I guess we grew up.”

“Did you know him before or after _Never Cry Wolf_? Saw that first edition on your shelf there.”

“You a fan?” Merlin asks, and it comes off more cagily than he intended.

“Nah, he’s just funny,” Eggsy shrugs, wandering over to Merlin’s neat bookshelf. “You’d think he wouldn’t be, not with the stuff he’s writing about, but he is. Even that moment when his photographer is killed, it’s hysterical.”

“Yes, it is, quite possibly, the funniest book about genocide you’ll ever read,” he says, quoting Salgado’s cover blurb with no small degree of pride.

Merlin is certain that the book wouldn’t exist if not for him, and is confident enough to not press the point. At the time, Harry, wrapped up in his grief and guilt, was in no state of mind to compile his articles into a long-form project, and that fell to Merlin, much like the practicalities of getting the body of the photographer repatriated. Merlin was the first person Harry called when it happened.

Merlin does not even remember the guy’s name, he realizes with surprise. The book only contains his pictures, not a single illustration after the account of his death. In reality, there were other photographers, Harry had to do his job, after all, even if nobody wanted to listen to the story he was telling at the time, not until alliances changed. But he put his foot down, he’d only have the man’s pictures, or none at all, what was his name again?

Merlin picks up his reading glasses and strolls over to the bookshelf. He does not even have to rifle through the pages to find the name: it’s in the dedication. _To Lee Unwin, who shouldn’t have._

Slowly, he takes off his glasses and sets the book aside. He is more amused than anything, really: out of all the reasons anybody ever slept with him, this is probably the most outlandish. 

He turns to Eggsy. “And when did you plan to tell me that your father was killed while on assignment with Harry?”


	2. Chapter 2

_Local taxi drivers were notorious for their qualms about transporting dead bodies: they were adamant that it would attract unnecessary attention at checkpoints. Having briefly contemplated getting our driver distracted and stuffing Lee’s body into the boot of the car while he was not looking, James and I eventually decided to pretend that our friend has had too much to drink. I sacrificed my trench coat to cover his shrapnel wounds. You’d have to admit that Lee looked dashing in it, that is, if you liked your men a little stiff._

Harry Hart, _Never Cry Wolf_

 

“I’ve met our new stringer, the one Chester is sending you,” Merlin says, slumped on his balcony like a surly gargoyle, pressing his phone to his ear with his shoulder. “He’s good. I can see him in _National Geographic_ in ten years.”

“I want someone who can be in _National Geographic_ in five years,” Harry growls, half a globe away. In the background, Merlin can hear the chirping of birds that he cannot identify.

“You can have Roxy back after she delivers the baby,” Merlin hopes that the desperation in his tone sounds somewhat conciliatory. “Between you and me, I have no idea how you guys even got this far. Yesterday at the party, she ran off to pee every fifteen minutes.”

“I like her,” Harry says petulantly, “I do not mind standing watch.”

“Well, her doctor minds. So does her boyfriend.”

“Can you send me Amelia from Iraq?” Harry grumbles in a tone that Merlin recognizes as being contrary on principle. He sighs.

He turns around to take a quick look at Eggsy through the glass door of his balcony, and Eggsy waves at him.

“No, because she’s on an embed with the US troops, and you know that. I’m telling you, the guy’s good.” Merlin takes a deep breath and finally says it. “Also, I thought you’d like to work with the son of Lee Unwin.”

“Absolutely not,” Harry says after a pause, like that’s the end of it. 

Which is how he finds himself in the arrivals zone of a local crumbling airport two days later. The fighting seems to have died down a bit, and Harry would have considered falling back to his base in Istanbul for a couple of days, if only for a shower that has water pressure worth the name. Instead he is glaring down the usual milling crowd, correspondents that are late to the party and humanitarian relief workers rubbing shoulders with local arm traffickers and overdressed students vying for a stint as a fixer.

He’s long past the age when false modesty stops being becoming, so Harry would be the first to admit that he’s a household name. His articles often end up fronting; that’s a lot of visibility for whoever works with him, and he probably owes the boy a leg up. He also learned caution, and he can usually predict, down to a minute, when it’s time to pack up and get out, so Lee’s boy will probably be safe with him, as safe as one can get. He knows his stories are good enough to be widely read, he’d just rather not think if they were good enough to cost the boy a father.

The boy looks nothing like Lee, which is a mixed blessing. “I’m a fan,” he says with a toothy grin, juggling an army surplus backpack, two Domke camera bags, a Learn Before You Land phrase book and scratched sunglasses which he eventually ends up holding in his teeth to shake Harry’s hand. “Wow, I’ll never wash my hand ever again.”

Harry winces. “I hope you don’t follow through on that plan.”

“So, what’s the plan for today, guv?” the boy asks as they settle into the backseat of a beat-up jeep. The boy sits with his legs wide open, taking up as much space as is humanly possible, a sprawling human octopus. Harry crosses his legs and stares out of the side window.

“I hope you have had enough sleep on your flight,” he says, without turning to look at the boy. “They want me to do refugees, so we might as well get it done and over with.”

“Merlin said you never cover refugees.”

Harry does not let it on, but he is hurt, just the slightest bit. Merlin is _his_ editor, and there he is, blabbing about Harry to any old Joe. He finally turns to glower at Eggsy. “As a matter of ethical preference, I do not do the pornography of trauma. I don’t see anything wrong with the position, no matter what Chester might think.”

The boy does not take a hint, and presses on. “Merlin says it’s because you don’t like reminders of how easily we can be stripped of control.”

“Well, if _Merlin_ said so.” Merlin must have really wanted to impress Eggsy, he thinks, amusement drowning out the feeling of betrayal. He sizes the boy up: a square chin, the hint of a smile caught at the corner of his lips. At a guess, he drawls, “My, Merlin does like them young these days.”

At least Eggsy has the good sense to blush, confirming his guess, and they spend the rest of the trip in blessed silence. He can get the assignment wrapped up in another week or so, and move on to the next job. This does not have to be too awkward.

As Eggsy gets out of the car, leaving his backpack behind, he blocks Harry’s path. “Doesn’t have to be misery porn, you know. Dunno, maybe you could get some new information out of them. Just a guess!”

Harry slams the door harder than he should, eliciting an outraged shout from the driver. “Bomb shelters hardly afford the best view. As witnesses, they are useless.”

As Eggsy lopes off into the crowd, brandishing his cameras, Harry heads over to the relief workers, some of whom he vaguely remembers from the early days of the war in Syria. He’s comfortable with their stories, with the usual mixture of adventure seekers, misplaced idealists on their way to a truly spectacular nervous breakdown, and efficient if harassed bureaucrats. He does not remember about Eggsy until a better part of two hours has passed.

He finds Eggsy in the midst of a throng, holding up a lively conversation with at least a dozen refugees at once. While short on actual shared vocabulary, Eggsy talks with his entire body, grimacing and mimicking, peppering his English with a dozen or so phrases from his phrase book, skewing heavily towards ‘gorgeous’ and ‘amazing’. The phrases that would have earned any local man a slap elicit nothing but smiles and giggles when coming from a gawky stranger. A kid no older than three aims at Eggsy with his finger and makes shooting sounds; Eggsy crumples to the ground - not for the first time either, if dust on his shirt is any indication - and takes a picture as he falls.

It’s not reporting: it is performance art, Harry thinks. He likes it. As they quickly go through the portraits on Eggsy’s camera screen, Harry ends up nodding in agreement. There’s none of the usual dramatic lighting bollocks, none of the deep tragic shadows; the faces are animated, people caught mid-gesture, the overwhelming joy of being alive lending them the dignity that they were so often denied. It is not till they get to the very end of the slideshow that Harry notices something. As familiar thrill passes through him, the whiff of a story he can tell better than anybody, even if he’d rather never see it again.

“What do you see?” he asks, jabbing his finger at the camera.

“Dunno what you mean, guv,” Eggsy shrugs.

Harry grabs the camera out of his hands and runs through the pictures again, this time stopping at panoramic shots, zooming in on the faces.

“There are quite a lot of children and women, yes. Disproportionately few adult men.”

“Maybe they are off fighting.”

“Some, maybe. But this is a religious minority, they have no stakes in the game, so you’d think they’d wait it out. Meet me at the car.”

Decidedly, he walks towards the crowd; unlike Eggsy, he actually has the language, functional and largely ungrammatical, but sufficient for his purposes. If anything, Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan taught Harry that he has no stomach for self-congratulatory dramatic overreactions of those that feign the lack of knowledge about the possible extent of human cruelty, and he disdains graphic depictions of violence as a crutch of sloppy reporters. He’s interested in the pregnant moments before the storm, when the scales have not yet tipped either way, and he never knew how many drops you have to see fall before you infer the existence of an ocean. Luckily, those same places taught him what questions to ask.

On his way back to the car, he pauses midway and fishes out his phone from under his flak jacket. Merlin would not know his text for a sign of forgiveness that it is, but such is the nature of most of their conversations, filtered through several time zones and two internal monologues where neither no longer knows what was said, and what was just implied. “You were right,” he types, “unless by ‘he’s good,’ you meant ‘he’s good in bed,’ because for that I’ll have to take your word.”

Eggsy exhibits the one instinct crucial to a war correspondent hell-bent on survival: he’s using his hour of downtime to catch up on sleep, curled up on the backseat and drooling over his dusty backpack. Harry bangs mercilessly on the roof of the jeep, and Eggsy wakes up with a start.

“Scoot over,” Harry shoves at his leg and climbs into the car next to him, spreads a map on his knees.

“So, this is what they say. The villages to the west, some six thousand men, women and children total, give or take, did not go for this safe zone, they went for that one.” He pokes at the map that is already tearing at the creases. “I’d imagine they would not cover more than five miles a day. That still brings them to this safe zone here within a week or two. Six thousand is a sizable crowd, you’d think, yet have we heard about the worsening humanitarian situation there?”

Eggsy stares at him with a mixture of horror and awe.

“You do make crying wolf into a spectator sport, guv, don’t you?”


	3. Chapter 3

_Imagine you are an insurgent in a small to medium-sized country most foreigners would be hard pressed to find on the map, and you are facing a peacekeeper infestation. While peacekeepers are generally little more than a nuisance, some might prefer to handle the situation quietly and efficiently, and this is where a peacekeeper kebab recipe comes in useful. Take about a dozen medium-sized peacekeepers, chop them up finely. The optimal piece size should make it hard for their commanding officer to determine, short of a DNA test, how many of his men went into the kebab. Exeunt peacekeepers._

_Unfortunately for peacekeepers, every insurgent in a small to medium-sized country most foreigners would be hard-pressed to find on the map, from Somali to Rwanda and Bosnia, knows the recipe._

Harry Hart, _Never Cry Wolf_

 

Harry strides out to the middle of the road and firmly plants his feet. His shoulders squared, he glares at a brightly graffitied technical wheezing its way towards him. Eggsy’d better be taking the fucking pictures, because he’s not risking his life for nothing with the guy whose driving philosophy boiled down to “let the strongest man win” even before he acquired a collection of shoulder-fired rocket launchers.

As an old pickup truck fitted with a heavy machine gun careens towards him, showing no signs of slowing down, Harry is suddenly painfully aware of all his surroundings: a burnt-down gas station to his right, Chloé of _Le Monde_ ducking for cover behind a sheet of corrugated metal that was once a kiosk, Eggsy hoisting his Canon up protectively like a gun. There would be no dignity in jumping to the side now, and, moreover, he knows that being an immovable object in the trajectory of a moving vehicle slightly increases your chances of survival, if the driver does not intend to hit you, that is. He runs through his last earthly errands. He has enough materials from the trip for Merlin to jigsaw them into a book. His untimely death would propel it straight to the top of bestseller charts, and keep it there. If this is the end, at least it is his own choices rather than blind fate that brought it on.

He always hoped that he’d meet his death with his eyes wide open and stare the bastard down, and yet, as the car is some forty feet away and not braking, he closes his eyes. The next time he opens them, they are watering from roiling dust, and his lungs immediately seize up in a cough. The bumper of the technical is not three feet away from his knees: too close to chalk it up to the driver’s mastery of his steed. If not for dumb luck, Harry realizes, he would be a messy splatter on asphalt, spared the trouble of reevaluating his approach to cultivating his personal image; well, at least the pictures must be truly spectacular.

As if to confirm his guess, the driver, a burly bearded man, jumps out and rushes over without bothering to close the door, and pulls him into a guilty bear hug.

“You show-off, you git,” Harry grumbles, his face pressed into a dirt-caked shoulder, “what would your mother say? Ouch!”

He disentangles himself after AK-47 slung over the driver’s shoulder jabs him in the ribs.

“You know what they call me these days?” the man asks, poking Harry’s chest with a dirty finger.

Harry does, but, seeing the man’s obvious pride, still shakes his head. “Nightrider!” the man exclaims, rolling his _r_ , and straightens his back.

“Obviously, the career of an insurgent leaves you with a lot of downtime to catch up on all the dystopia films out there.” Even with his nerves still on edge after his near-death experience, Harry cannot help smiling. “What else is new?”

The man just shrugs. “Well, you know, we take the good with the bad.”

“In memory of the good old days, I bring you excellent free publicity,” Harry spreads his arms in a magnanimous gesture, as if their two beat-up jeeps were a fully decked-out CNN crew. 

Nightrider chuckles. “Those same good old days when you would disregard all my recommendations, and I would get beat up at every other checkpoint.”

“Those were the days,” Harry nods seriously, watching the French team approach. Chloé gestures wildly at the men in the back of the truck, asking for permission to take pictures.

“That was a dick move,” Jean-Marie, a new _Le Monde_ guy who was probably sent here to cut his teeth, hisses, and spits. “I have enough grey hair without my colleagues keeping me in the dark like that.”

Nightrider pulls him into a hug too, just in case. “Well, he’s always like that. Spins yarn like a pro, but is a dick, the good with the bad, right?”

While the French team photographs Nightrider’s men on their truck, shaking their historically interesting, yet tactically imperfect collection of weaponry in the air, Harry and Nightrider wander through the brittle black skeleton of the gas station, indecently out of place in the serene landscape. Eggsy trails behind them, going for incongruously oversaturated colours of an old-school western. Harry checks out the looted souvenir shop from back in the day when the area still had tourist traffic, and takes a selfie with a postcard proclaiming in cheerful if misspelled lettering, “Wish you were hear.” He sends it to Merlin, who would never willingly spend a day in a city with a population under two million.

“Who holds the passes further west?” Harry finally asks, squinting at the beam of sunlight streaming through the hole in the roof.

“Oh, those are the crazies. Wouldn’t go there, if I were you. Like, we are the disgruntled middle class, yeah?” Nightrider says, elbowing his AK-47 out of the way. “We don’t want that shit to come to our thresholds, so we do a bit of patrolling, that kind of thing. And those there are here for the thrill of it. Not locals either, trust me, we know our kind.”

“And do you know if they are unhappy with anyone in particular?”

Nightrider shrugs. “Like, anybody who cannot fight back? You’ve gotta bribe your men with something, and giving them a taste of power usually does the trick. Wouldn’t go there, boss.”

“Don’t worry, we are not.”

He keeps telling himself that nothing would have changed the outcome. While the meeting with Nightrider that he arranged stealthily and was so proud of held them up quite a bit, they probably would not have braved a return trip over serpentine roads in the thickening dark in any case. Moreover, they desperately needed new faces in their footage: all the insurgents closer to the regional centers favoured by journalists were already familiar, and most days, they were ridiculously outnumbered by colourul media crews. When she was still here, Roxy was running out of creative angles that would allow her to leave the other reporters out of the picture.

They continued their trip towards the refugee camp in the lengthening afternoon shadows.

“How do you know the guy?” asks Eggsy, a note of resentment in his voice.

Harry stretches his legs out the best he can. “Some ten years ago, before he was a minor warlord, he was still a lowly grad student contemplating committing a dissertation on Shakespeare, and he moonlighted as my fixer. One man in his time plays many parts.”

Harry should know by now, the way he knows his blood type, Merlin’s phone number, and the addresses of British embassies across a score of war-torn countries, that it is always the best planned operations that go the most spectacularly wrong. This was supposed to be a nice controlled environment to give the boy a sense of the job. Harry chose the setting, Harry chose the background. That made him unpardonably complacent.

They arrive at the camp after dark, too late to do any work. The security checkpoint they pass is a joke: if need be, Harry notes, it would not even keep the emaciated refugees in, nevermind keeping out anybody interested in getting in. It’s only there to make a point: the world is watching (unless, that is, it gets distracted by news from more picturesque places, or even by a higher body count somewhere else, by someone’s lucky shot of a particularly cute dead child). Harry finds the assumption that everybody should care two figs about the world’s good opinion somewhat presumptuous.

No new arrivals from beyond the pass, he finds out, and is momently sickened by a surge of pride washing over him. He knows his stories. As they settle for the night in a room in the camp’s health center, he’s already busy figuring out which of his local contacts might have friends or relatives in the area, or at least who might know those who do. Which is why the explosion catches him wide awake, about an hour later.

The walls of a prefabricated building of the health center would not afford them much protection anyway, so he does not feel guilty for rushing out, Eggsy trailing behind him, with only his Canon and his boxers for an outfit. 

The forks of flames are rending the darkness somewhere by the gates of the camp. Harry’s willing to bet good money on a suicide bomb, although he does wonder when that, as opposed to the careless handling of diesel or any number of more mundane explanations, became his first automatic assumption. Chloé, hastily dressed but very determined, elbows Harry aside and dives into the crowd already gathering in the narrow streets of the camp, her camera held up over her head. Eggsy touches Harry’s elbow, and he veers on the boy, glowering.

“No matter what happens, you stay behind me.”

“Great shots of your manly shoulders. Them shoulders bring all the readers to the yard.” Eggsy sneers, jutting his chin out.

“You stay behind,” Harry repeats.

“That’s where the French are going,” Eggsy says, trying to inch past him.

Harry slams him into the wall hard enough to make the whole structure shake. “Oh right, that’s where the French are going. Famous last words, right up there with ‘Why don’t I camp on this nice rooftop with my assortment of lenses to photograph the US troops changing positions.’ You don’t want to be known for being crazier than the French, you want to be known for being alive to tell the story.”

Judging by the shift in Eggsy’s face, that’s when it finally dawns on him, to Harry’s relief and consternation.

“Unlike my dad there,” Eggsy enunciates, standing on tiptoe to bridge their difference in height.

“Yes,” Harry barks, still looming over him, not letting go of his shoulders. “And he had about five years of experience on you.”

“You know what-” and, while Harry has the general idea of what Eggsy might say later, he is cut off by a blast falling much closer.

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Harry swears, his mouth suddenly going dry. “They are shelling the fucking refugee camp.”

Since no spot is any safer than the other under the circumstances, he makes Eggsy get a flak vest, and then they set out to take a look at the second site.

“A mortar round, at a guess?” he asks Jean-Marie, having caught up with the French by a small crater. Jean-Marie takes a picture with his phone and updates his twitter.

The next explosion happens at the opposite side of the camp; if the scatter is anything to go by, the insurgents are firing from somewhere close to the maximum range. Initially, Harry is a little bit startled to see Chloé weeping: nobody was hit yet, as far as they saw, and there are no wailing mothers or other staples of misery reporting. And then, slowly, realization dawns: this is not only a story to report, or a danger to shield Eggsy from. He himself is not immune from becoming the object of the story. The thought, at least as long as it is not given an opening to sink in and become unpleasant, is merely startling.

He casts a quick look at Eggsy. There don’t seem to be any fortified structures around, and there’s no getting away, because the lights of a car racing across the plains is only more likely to attract fire. It’s a waiting game from now on.

He checks his cell phone charge, calculating if a call is worth it, and dials. Merlin must have been asleep, and Harry takes a moment to revel in his sleep-blurred brogue before he tells Merlin where he is, and what is going on.

“I’ll put Charlie on it,” Merlin says, immediately alert.

“We’ve got Jean-Marie Girard and Chloé Lévy of _Le Monde_ with us,” Harry adds, looking around. Chloé seems to have pulled herself together, Jean-Marie is angrily jabbing at his phone. “Jean-Marie’s live-tweeting, so you can follow him.”

On the other end of the line, he can hear Merlin frantically typing, giving out orders and backup plans, and probably mounting a mission to get them out, if there’s anything to be got out by the end of the night.

Another mortar round, closer this time. Eggsy perks up, taking pictures of the inferno spreading along the skyline.

“Harry, please talk to me,” Merlin says in a thin voice, and that’s when the horror finally sinks it. Harry can die. Harry can become someone else’s story. “Harry, can you hear me?”

And that Harry cannot take, he can keep it together as long as he does not have to calm Merlin down. He looks around; Merlin probably would not require reassurances of Eggsy, so he murmurs “Talk to Eggsy,” and throws the cell phone at the boy, who catches it one-handed.

“He says it will be fine,” Eggsy says, returning him the phone after a while. Good, means Merlin finally got his act together.

“We should be getting back to the checkpoint,” he says. The camp is a sprawling shanty town, a mishmash of neat prefabricated houses that melt rather than burn, tents distributed after the relief workers realized just how brutally they underestimated the scope of the problem, and corrugated metal huts of the latecomers. He’d rather not get caught in the maze after it all goes up in flames.

After they reach a wider avenue, they have to pause and wait as two medics rush past them, carrying a screaming bloodied little form on the stretcher. Chloé steps forward as if to follow them, her camera at the ready, but then clearly weighs the prospect of getting lost in the crowd against the prospect of taking a prize-winning picture, and stays.

They are almost at the checkpoint when Harry realizes that the shelling got denser; in his palm, he rather feels than hears his phone ring. He cuts the call off, because he does not want Merlin to hear this. 

He calls back in a moment of relative calm, as they grind to a standstill in the denser crowd leading up to the checkpoint, and Merlin picks up immediately.

“With so many of you there, this is going to be big. For once, you are the protagonist.” He says it so fast that Harry suspects he practiced it. 

“Darling, I’m always the protagonist.”

“Well, don’t let it get to your-”

Which is when someone, somewhere must have hit a cell tower, because the line goes dead. Angrily, Harry stuffs his phone into his pocket.

“I’m sorry I slept with your partner,” Eggsy says, catching up with him. “I thought you’d be a dick, well, you kind of are, but-”

Amusing though near-death confessions might be, Harry cuts him short, making a mental note to taunt the boy with it at some later point. For now, they just have to get out. “Knock yourself out, I don’t have a partner.”

“Hell, you don’t have to break up with him over this, he was well-liquored, and I practically jumped his bones. The fault’s all mine.”

Harry steps on something unpleasantly mushy, and almost falls. In a crowd this thick, it’s unlikely he would ever be able to get back up. The checkpoint, meant to protect, is fast becoming a death trap. Eggsy clasps his forearm to make sure that the crowd does not separate them, and he has to yell into Harry’s ear to be heard; Harry can feel Eggsy’s spittle on his earlobe.

Something explodes all too close for Harry’s comfort. The crowd boils up like a surging wave crashing against a breakwater, looking for a way out that is not there. For a moment, he cannot breathe. Clasping his elbows in front of his chest to afford himself some breathing space, he tries to look around to make sure that his people are still there.

“I’m so sorry,” Eggsy shouts again into his ear. Harry winces.

“Wait, you mean Merlin?” he yells back, finally pushing past the checkpoint and catching on to what Eggsy was implying. “Merlin’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh,” Eggsy sighs with relief. And, as they are finally out of the throng, adds, “But why isn’t he?”

As Harry turns every which way, trying to catch sight of the French, he marvels at the absurdity of the question. That just happened to be the best arrangement that they could work out, not that Harry never wondered about the could-have-beens, but it’s not like there was a paucity of other pliable bodies around to risk upsetting the equilibrium that he had with Merlin.

Two things happen simultaneously: Harry locates the French several steps ahead, and he notices the lights veering down the mountain slopes some three miles ahead. Great, he thinks as Chloé rushes over to hug him and Eggsy; on top of all those disappearances, now the insurgents want to overrun the refugee camp. This easily makes it the story of the decade for the country. Isn’t that bloody great luck for him.

They’d better move off the road, hide behind some crags somewhere. Even if the insurgents spread out to finish off those that tried to run away, nobody would take their group for locals. They might be abducted and held for ransom, but their survival chances in this scenario are actually much improved. This is not his battle.

Before he has time to think it through, he finds himself saying, “Right, if they want this shithole to ever get another agricultural credit, they’d better know that this is not how we do things. They’d better know that there are journalists here. We will get the story out.” 

Except that it never works like that, as Harry knew all too well after his first big assignment investigating Saddam Hussein’s ethnic cleansings of the Kurds. Sometimes, nobody cares, even if the story’s good, even if you believe it’s worth dying for. He winces, remembering the dead weight of Lee’s body. 

Nevertheless, he poses himself in the middle of the road leading up to the refugee camp, making sure that the shining word PRESS on his flak jacket is visible. For the second time in less than 24 hours, he tries to stare down the approaching pickup trucks, and for a blissful moment anger drowns out everything else.


	4. Chapter 4

_”-sources in Iran allege.”_

_“Will you add that to everything I say from now on? It would look mighty funny after ‘You’ll have a monster of a hangover tomorrow’.”_

_My editor set his pint aside and kept going through my notes with a red pen without paying me any heed._

_”I would also avoid the g-word, if I were you.”_

_Lee and me drove past dozens of demolished shambles that used to be villages, dodging checkpoints and Iraqi troops, and Lee, the lucky bastard that he was, checked out before it came to documenting Kurdish civilian casualties of the Halabja chemical attack. Who’d have thought that Iraqi patrols would be easier to dodge than my editor’s red pen. Cautiously, I inquired, “And when, in your editorial opinion, does the g-word become legitimate? Do we wait for at least 10% of the population to be wiped out? Should we wait for after 50%?”_

_He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Iran is our enemy, which makes Saddam our friend. We do not meddle in their internal affairs over what sources in Iran allege, and my personal opinion is irrelevant.”_

_I’ve never come this close to strangling my editor over a matter that had nothing to do with punctuation._

Harry Hart, _Never Cry Wolf_

 

The reports from the site that used to be the refugee camp do not start filing in until three days later. Several breakaway groups that nobody payed any mind to apparently united and mounted a surprise attack on the closest town, which happened to be a somewhat important railroad junction.

Merlin gives up trying to make any sense of the reports by the end of the first day. All the correspondents in the vicinity seem to be practicing hotel journalism, lounging by pools in a half-dozen well-protected hotels in the area, while if one were to believe the semi-official briefs pouring in from both sides, the area is captured and recaptured at least five times before lunch. The line between witnessing and local gossip, fine even under the most favourable conditions, dissipates under his fingers.

To cut out the intermediaries, he bookmarks the twitter hashtags for the area, all the tacky yet unavoidable #saveourchildren, and tries to wring them for every last drop of data with the support of googletranslate and a progressively stir-crazy Roxy. Somebody, somewhere saw an armored car. Someone’s cousin was shot dead for taking pictures of the insurgents. There’s a tank in the suburbs of a town he knows little about, and cares even less. He misses Harry’s voice, turning the chaotic noise into an orderly story with the setup, climax, and resolution; he misses Harry, he thinks desperately. On some level, he always knew that a lot of Harry’s stories were about Harry, he just never realized the extent to which Harry turned the local and the incomprehensible into the universal. Merlin takes a deep breath and tries to reach for the space that he must have internalized by now, rewriting and shaping Harry’s stories over the years as he did: after the mounting atrocities become too much to process, you don’t have a choice but to turn it into the best story you can, and keep telling it until it’s nothing but your story, snarking your way through whatever the universe might throw at you, as humanity has been doing since the dawn of days. Still, he longs for a story that Harry will tell, after he is released.

The third day is the worst; the government forces retake the area for good, and reports come flooding in, catching Merlin at a low point when insomnia robs him of rationality. There are several unidentified Europeans among the dead, and Merlin pesters the regional Reuters office to send someone over to make sure that it’s not Harry; nor Eggsy, he adds as an afterthought, guiltily.

Several hours pass before the bodies are ID’ed as relief workers; and he has all of a couple hours of relief before the flurry of rallying the forces and the onset of the media cycle of calls for release. 

It falls to Merlin to give a speech on TV. He is not quite sure who made that call, except that Jeanine put her foot down: since she could not stay married to the man, she’s in no position to make it about her on TV. Merlin’s not in the position either, but both Harry’s parents are already deceased, and he does not have any siblings handy.

“I’m his editor,” he says a little bit too quick, before anybody has time to jump to any conclusions. On Eggsy’s side, there’s his mother and baby sister, who, he hopes, fill the sob story quota for the evening.

He’s running on the lack of sleep, long-distance phone calls and nervous energy, and he does not have much of a speech written out. “It’s not that his stories make the world a better place,” he starts, clearing his throat, “because nothing can, not in the long run. But he makes those around him strive to, if you know-”

The presenter mercifully cuts his ramblings short. “What would you tell him, if he comes back?”

Merlin pinches the bridge of his nose, trying not to fixate on that _if_. “To those that hold him: my condolences, mates, I know he’s impossible to put up with at close quarters. To Harry: punctuation really does not function the way you believe it does.”

All in all, it is disastrous, but short.

After he gets back to his flat, he goes rifling through the boxes with his things from the university years, that _if_ still ringing in his ears. Harry might pride himself on his contacts on the ground, but Merlin has all the institutional connections, and then some.

At the very bottom of the box, there’s an envelope with black-and-white photographs that he thought tasteful and understated at the time, but now finds as clumsy and ridiculous as most amateurish erotica is bound to be. Luckily, both faces are visible and perfectly recognizable. He scans one.

Outing threats go against Merlin’s principles, and blackmail is firmly illegal anyway, but, given the choice between his principles and having Harry back, he’d choose Harry anytime. After all, he is the best thing that ever happened to Harry. When pressed, he wouldn’t deny the opposite either.

There’s long been rumours that the country’s security system is a joke, and the other man in the pictures, who at the moment happens to be the chief of national security, definitely got the position for his family connections rather than any real accomplishments. Merlin can only hope that, if the man has enough clout to make the members of local opposition and human rights groups disappear by the dozen, he should also have enough clout to extract four journalists from the rebels’ base, even if his troops cannot quench the rebellion. 

It’s surprising how easy it is to get his private number: the chief of the regional Reuters office knows the CEO of the local government-sponsored TV channel, and the CEO’s niece is sleeping with a businessman who is the man’s second cousin. Before he has time to think it through, Merlin sends him the scan.

His phone starts ringing almost immediately. He cuts off the call, allowing the man to stew in the newly-found knowledge of the indiscretions of his youth coming back with a vengeance. If Merlin was not this desperate, he would have felt sorry for the man. After the sixth call, he finally picks up.

“I’m Merlin. You probably do not remember me, but I sure have the pictures that prove our biblical knowledge of each other.”

“What do you want?” barks the voice with a stronger accent than he remembers.

“Now that you’ve asked so nicely-” Merlin spells the names and the possible locations. “The moment they set foot in the British embassy, I will destroy the pictures. If anything happens to them, however, the pictures go live. Similarly, if anything happens to _me_ , the pictures go live.”

“What if they are already dead, your friends there?”

“It’s in your best interests to prove that they are not, or else you’d better find a way to align that part of your biography with your country’s anti-gay laws.”

After the line goes dead, Merlin buries his face in his palms. It might work, but then, the lack of sleep is hardly the best advisor, and Merlin can only hope that he has not just doomed Harry, or himself, to an unpleasant death.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Obviously, this is my visual for Eggsy in the first scene:  
>   
> Only, you know, with an expression of deep concern.

_After alliances changed, of course, everybody was eager to hear the other end of the story, and this is how you, oh gentle reader, have come to buy this book, the later editions of which all have “New York Times Bestseller” written across the cover in garish letters._

_Those of you aspiring to become journalists should remember that popularity is a lady as fickle as she is unpredictable, so you should never underestimate the importance of a person who would listen to you no matter what. I was lucky to have had that person._

Harry Hart, _Never Cry Wolf_

 

On the fifth night after Harry goes missing, Merlin can no longer function on the lack of sleep, but sleep still does not come. He washes down two sleeping pills with a pint of Guinness, and gratefully dozes off, his cell phone next to his pillow.

He wakes up with a start some four hours later to three missed phone calls from a familiar number with an international code. There are new developments, and he has been dead to the world and unaware of them for the last hour. He wishes he were awake to pick up the phone, because making a choice to call back and find out comes harder than he expected. _Of course_ , Harry’s fine, he tells himself, wandering out into the kitchen. Or at least, Harry is fine until he calls back and finds out that he’s not. Just in case, he greedily savours the moments when Harry is still alive, and well, and collating the data from his latest grand adventure.

He pours himself a glass of icy water and dials.

“They are at the embassy,” the voice barks, “I hope I can trust you to hold up your end of the deal.”

 _Or else_ hangs unspoken; as he puts down the glass, Merlin realizes that his hands shake.

Of course, he’s at the airport when the jet arrives, pushed to the side by the throng of reporters. He watches Harry pose for the photographers and TV crews, turning and smiling, his arm slung easily across Eggsy’s shoulders, blissfully, gloriously, breathtakingly alive.

When Eggsy’s mother rushes over to them and pulls Eggsy into a hug, he takes it as his cue and steps forward too. Over his mother’s shoulder, Eggsy catches his gaze, and, pointing towards Harry, starts animatedly talking with his hands. Merlin frowns. 

Visibly despairing of his inferior mind-reading skills, Eggsy wraps his palm around a shaft of air and shoves it up and down several times in a universal representation of jerking off, and then points from Merlin to Harry. Harry chuckles and puts his hand on Merlin’s shoulder.

Given their luck, that will be the image accompanying the news of the grand homecoming, because what better visuals can one get for the voiceover saying “David Cameron welcomes the news of the journalists’ return.”

The next day, the flurry of press-conferences is about to start. “You are booked into Hilton,” Merlin says, “or I can take you home.”

The drive home passes in silence. Merlin is reveling in having Harry back, and he knows that Harry knows. There’s little point to saying as much, so he just keeps glancing at the mirror to make sure that Harry’s still there, lapping up his grin.

The moment they step over the threshold, Harry makes a beeline for his desk. “May I use your computer? I need to write it down.”

Merlin pulls out the cord. “Nuh-uh, no writing happening today. Do you want Chinese or Indian for the celebratory takeout?”

Harry squares his shoulders. “I’m not made of glass. I will not break.”

“Trust me, I know. Sit,” he commands, and when Harry obeys, Merlin kneads his fingers into the tense muscles of his shoulders. Harry’s thrumming with pent-up nervous energy, and Merlin knows him at those phases, knows it never ends well, and yet he is too happy to care too much. 

After a while, he can feel the tension drain out of Harry’s posture. The man relaxes into his touch, pliant and easy, and then suddenly covers Merlin’s palm with his. Merlin raises an eyebrow.

“Eggsy thought we were together.”

“Not an uncommon misconception,” Merlin hums, running his palms up and down Harry’s spine one last time.

Judging by the way he tries to turn around and catch his eyes, this is news to Harry, who generally operates on the belief that everybody appreciates him, and that makes him surprisingly daft to the nuances. Merlin makes him lean back in the chair, but Harry’s tensing again. “And did you ever think- and what if we did get together?”  
“No,” Merlin answers, making up in firmness for what he lacks in conviction. “Not after that one time when you almost killed me with your dick.”

All that Merlin remembers from his one lapse of judgment, almost half a lifetime ago now, is the fact that Harry's spectacularly bad in the sack. Fortunately for Merlin, Harry's not the biggest boy around, but he was still fucking into his throat relentlessly enough to make his eyes water, holding his head in place and not letting him pull away. Neither of them ever brought that up later, so it never became an issue.

 

Harry winces. “Ouch, that’s crude. I was drunk. And grieving.”

“I don’t see how that is relevant to my experience,” Merlin notes with great dignity.

Harry concedes his point with a nod, but after a moment drawls, “I learned. I am sure that some of my conquests would be willing to provide written testimonies.”

“I hope they don’t.” This is not the conversation Merlin wants to have without looking Harry in the eye, so he finally lets go of his shoulders and leans against the table in front of him. Of course, this is also not the conversation he wants to have, ever, period, but short of escaping his flat, there’s not much he can do about that.

“Honestly though,” and Merlin has seen this expression before, when Harry was fighting to make his story heard, when Harry believed it was him against the whole wide world, never on good days, and it scares him. ”I will find someone as long as I go into the field, adrenaline being the greatest harbinger of romance. I’m not so sure about you.”

Merlin cannot help laughing. “Did you honestly just try to get into my pants by saying that nobody else would? Harry, always a good Samaritan.”

“That did not come out the way I thought it would,” Harry crosses his arms over his chest, and, firmly not looking at Merlin, adds, “But I think we should at least try.”

Merlin hoped it would never come to this. He hoped that they would circle around the issue, make light of it with a couple of borderline offensive jokes, and drop it for the next decade or so. Slowly, lost for words for once, he starts, “I don’t doubt that we are excellent friends. I’m as grateful for that day you wandered into my office as, I’m sure, are you. However, I long outgrew the naive teenage notion that I should demand everything of a single person. You discuss politics with some people, and then you go to a bar with a different group, and the third group contains prospective fuck buddies. You do not demand all that from a single person, because that’s a lot of weight to put on anybody’s shoulders, and it just never works out.”

Harry narrows his eyes, cold anger coming to the fore. “Do you? And, since you are such an expert on keeping friendship and sex compartmentalized, when was the last time you had a steady relationship?”

Merlin knows better than to take the bait. His voice level, he says, “I was going steady with Steven for three months, thank you very much, before you decided that Jeanine needed a break from you and invited yourself to crash on my couch for a month.”

“And you did not tell me to rent a flat. Rather, you told him you’d call him back.”

“You needed support.”

“And your dick needed sucking.”

Harry stands up sharply and pins him to the table, putting his hands on the tabletop on both sides of Merlin. Merlin patiently moves one away. “Look, the last time I had any interest in people who were oh so curious about exploring new facets of their sexuality was when I was a fresher. You should get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a long day.”

At least that does the trick, he thinks with a mixture of relief and unexpected treacherous regret. He makes the bed for himself on the living room sofa, leaving Harry the king-size bed in the bedroom, which Harry takes for granted.

Not a half-hour passes before Harry walks back into the living room and, without turning on the lights, crawls onto the sofa next to him, presses against his back and for a while just breathes, his nose pressed against the nape of Merlin’s neck.

“I know you are awake,” he whispers after a while.

“I wonder what gave me away. Drop it.” 

“I need you,” Harry whispers, “please.”

And that is so typical of Harry that Merlin almost rolls his eyes: the implicit assumption that the universe would just roll over for him, if he wanted something bad enough, and the unwavering faith in himself. That’s what made Harry brilliant, made him into a planet that pulled everything around into its orbit, and Merlin does not even have it in him to be angry, not anymore. This he can give Harry, because he cannot see that faith betrayed. 

Merlin turns around, pinning Harry to the cushions with his body and almost pushing him off the sofa. He has a retort ready at the tip of his tongue, but the look on Harry’s face startles him into silence. In the dim light filtering in through the windows, the face that stares back at him is the face of someone much younger, more open and vulnerable, the face of someone who is not used to laying himself bare and is almost resentful of the need. Merlin’s mouth forms around a silent _oh_. He expected anything but this, or just about, and this scares and angers him.

Cautiously, Merlin tangles his hand in Harry’s sweaty hair, brushing stray strands aside from his forehead. Harry tries to reach up for a kiss, but Merlin leans back, intent on looking, cataloguing with the years’ habit each unfamiliar expression, running his fingers over new wrinkles. 

He’s never seen Harry like this, nor suspected him capable of it, and if the tense lines at the corners of Harry’s eyes are any indication, neither did he suspect it himself, until it was much too late. Come what may, Merlin thinks, as Harry presses his palms to the back of his skull, and pulls him into a kiss.

Harry is pushy with the newly discovered, or at least newly acknowledged need, a desperate crush of lips and teeth; he kisses like this was owed him, and unjustly denied, and he is more than willing to claim what is his by right. To parry, Merlin shifts, experimentally grinding their hips together, and Harry responds like this is the best thing that happen to him in a long time, gasping for breath and pushing up into the touch.

Merlin reaches down, carefully wedging one hand between their bodies, and rubs at Harry’s cock through his underwear. This is uncomfortable, the angle’s all wrong and he can already hear his wrist complaining, but he’s unwilling to shift away from the heat of that sinewy body next to his, like it might disappear the moment he blinks.

As Merlin frees Harry’s cock from his boxers, Harry makes a desperate little sound, his perfect composure, there seemingly even when he sleeps, suddenly swept away. This is not the Harry he knows, or at least not fully, for the intensity of a controlled explosion is always there, no matter what Harry does; and Merlin can get used to this side of him as well. Merlin bites down on Harry’s shoulder, to hold and to leave a mark, overwhelmed with what he got.

Harry tries to pull his briefs down, scrabbling at them without much coordination while trying to push into Merlin’s grip, and Merlin shimmies a bit, helping him, bringing their bodies together again. Harry moans next to his ear, perfectly responsive to his every move, obedient, desperate, _his_. Merlin tries to memorize it all, the way Harry twitches when he drags his thumb over the underside of his cock, the way Harry breathes out through clenched teeth when Merlin runs his lips over his exposed neck, already prickly with morning stubble, the way he convulses when he comes, like a fish on a hook, lost for breath, beached, out of his depth, seemingly exhilarated and horrified in equal measure.

Still soft and uncoordinated after his orgasm, Harry finally wraps his palm around Merlin’s cock, and Merlin was about ready to conclude charitably that that was not the most skillful hand job in his life, but then he lifted his eyes to Harry’s face, flushed and open and curious, and apparently that is all it takes these days to make Merlin throw his head back and spill all over Harry’s fingers, like a teenager that comes at the first sight of a cock.

“This is not indicative of my usual performance,” he gasps, mortified, and Harry convulses with nervous laughter.

“Well, you’ll just have to prove that, won’t you,” he finally says, when he can finally control his breath.

After a moment’s hesitation, Merlin nods. That’s the program he is fine with, more or less.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With this done, I'm suddenly stranded without a plotbunny gnawing on me (mmm, carnivorous bunnies), and that's proper horrifying. Would any kind soul be willing to throw prompts at me? (Harry/Merlin is my OTP, as some of you might have guessed; Hartwin, Merlin/Roxy and Valentine/Gazelle do not float my boat; and I'm up for everything else, I think.) I cannot guarantee anything, because this madness of writing 1,000+ words a day has to stop at some point, I just don't want that point to be now. I like the extra traffic of boinking imaginary people in my head XD

**Author's Note:**

> The two things that I'm most obviously pilfering for random facts are _It's What I Do_ by Lynsey Addario and _A Problem from Hell_ by Samantha Power. Might add more as more stuff crops up.


End file.
